Over the last 3 weeks-ish I’ve started to learn the mystical wonders of Papervision 3D.
For the uninitiated, Papervision 3D is the creation of Carlos Ulloa, Andy Zupko, Seb Lee-Delisle, and many more people that I’ve just to find out about! It is described as an open source realtime 3D engine for Flash. A quick Google around the web for examples and the like will turn up some rather nice examples of what the engine is capable of.
Here are a couple of notable examples:
In an ABSOLUT WORLD – a really nice example from Carlos Ulloa created for Absolut Vodka. It’s a relatively simple set of models, but it’s done SO well. A 2D physics engine has also been implemented, and it’s possible to rearranged the interface and have lots of fun before even looking at the content!
PARK.seasons – I was shown this example only last week by a friend and created by Den Ivanov. This is a prime example of the marvels you can achieve with Papervision. It’s quite difficult to explain actually, so have a look! At first you will probably think “wow, that’s simple”, but look again and you’ll realise that the concept is rather complex.
Technical demos and examples – by Andy Zupko. Andy’s extensions to the Papervision engine are literally amazing, when you think that this is all be achieved with the Flash Player.
Big and Small – is the product of Plug-In Media, of which Seb Lee-Delisle is Technical Director. It’s an impressive endeavour to create a complete interactive world that’s fun for children. It’s based on the children’s TV series of the same name, and is produced by the BBC and Kindle. Check out some of the screenshots and videos in Seb’s blogpost and you will see the effort, love and dedication that’s gone into creating an immersive world. You can also see that this example shows that it’s possible to create clutered, colourful and cosey 3D scenes, aswell as the clean lines and reflections of the Absolut World example…
…in a word Papervision is one diverse beasty!
Soooo, onto my creations so far, none of which are as accomplished as the examples above. I originally started playing around with the engine in Flash, but I quickly realised that there were some things that weren’t possible unless I used pure Actionscript with Flex. Having said that, it probably ‘is’ possible to do many of these things in Flash, but I just don’t know how. I can’t admit to being an amazing AS3 coder – yet…
The following are links to all the little programs I’ve made. They are all centralised around a single theme (which is my way of saying they’re all pretty similar and boring!). Through all these examples, I have learnt many things about setting up materials, positioning 3D lights and manipulating the camera. In particular, there are pretty much an infinite number of ways to set up materials, so it has been quite fun to explore…
Fire up your speakers aswell because in many of these examples there is 3D sound placement! When I knew little about the capabilites of the Papervision engine I didn’t know that it featured its own 3D sound methods, so several of the early examples feature my own 3D sound efforts! I used simple phythagorus to find out the distance between the camera coordinates and a set point in 3D space (rather 2D space, ignoring the y-axis, which is the up and down component). If the camera was within a set radius, a sound object was faded in. I’m sure with more time (and ignorance of the Papervision methods!) I would have perfected my 3D sound method, but I think the Papervision way of doing things is much slicker 
The final example, 3d7, is my first attempt at mucking around with applying Flash filters to 3D models. However, from a personal point of view, I think you should be able to apply the filters to materials, rather than the models. This is pure ignorance of the hierarchy of the engine’s structure, just in case anyone goes “hmph, ignorant little nit”…
Anyway, that’ll do for now i think… more later!
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